Hitler Stalin

I was wondering... Hitler and Stalin had a pact saying that if Hitler took 1/2 of Poland, then Stalin could 'have' the other 1/2. When the event occured, Britain and France declared war on Germany, but not on the USSR. Why is that? Why is it that the Allies never went after the USSR? Is it true that Hitler wanted Poland to still exist as a small state, but that Stalin refused this? Was communism at the time considered the lesser of two evils?

Many thanks,

Yes.

The allies did plan hostilities against the USSR although this was more in the context of the Winter War. About as far as these plans got was a scheme to send aid to Finland and another scheme to bomb Baku, neither of which came to anything.

Search me - because they were uselessly ineffectual, indecisive and inconsistent? Probably a good job they didn't though.

No, Hitler wanted to enslave and/or exterminate the 'slavic untermensch' in Poland just as he did in Russia. Poland ceased to exist once it was occupied by Germany. Russia did at least raise a Polish national army later in the war and recognised the existance of Poland as a separate state (even if it did have half the Red Army sitting in it).

jackbooted Germans wearing nazi swastikas, nazism was probably viewed as a greater threat than communism. The USSR had not shown any great inclination to go around assimiliating a 'Greater Reich' by invading or occupying half of central Europe in the previous five years - they did of course occupy eastern Poland and the Baltic States later on. Poland and the Baltic States are a long way away from France.

Cheers

Roughly correct.

Britain and France declared war on Germany on September 3, a couple of weeks before the Soviets invaded Poland. This was not due to any strong feelings towards the Poles, but rather to stop Germany. As the Soviet Union had not been practicing territorial expansion on a large scale before that, it seemed superfluous to go to war against it.

In something like a year and a half before the invasion of Poland, the Germans had annexed Austria, part of Czechoslovakia, then broke up the rest of Czechoslovakia to form a puppet state and a protectorate, and grabbed the Memel area from Lithuania. The Soviet Union had done nothing to expand its borders in Europe since the Russo-Polish War of 1920-21.

In the first place, it was hard to get to. In the second place, while they were making plans, Germany attacked and conquered France, and after that Britain really didn't need more complications.

Hitler wanted Poland to be primarily occupied by Germans, with the remaining Poles as an illiterate slave race. I'd say this is incompatible with letting it still exist. It wasn't just Hitler; lots of conservatives in the Army seemed to think the very existence of Poland to be an insult to Germany.

It was the lesser of two dangers, and some people (like Churchill) understood that very clearly. By people making the decisions in Britain and France, it seems to have been considered the greater of the two evils. In France, the government was on shaky ground in negotiating with the Soviets, and the British government refused to conduct meaningful negotiations, preferring to try to negotiate with Hitler.

There was no way Britain and France could have got after Russia, which in any event did not seem to pose any threat to them. Russia proved unable to administer a sound defeat even to tiny Finland in the months after the Polish tragedy, and in Poland had played the part more of an opportunistic hyena than an invading force. Finally, given that Lvov in eastern Poland is now part of Ukraine, and the whole of Poland both diminished and shifted to the westward, there may have been some feeling that Russia had legitimate claim to some of the territory it seized. The boundaries in Europe were only 22 years old in 1940. One can be forgiven for being skeptical about dying for a line that might move in every generation.

all the best

The official soviet position in 1939 was that they entered poland due to the collapse of the polish state in order to protect their own frontiers and to 'restore order'. Their claim, in essence, was that the polish state had ceased to exist. They then organized 'votes' in their portions of poland that they occupied that joined them to the soviet union. The fact that the territories in question were not ethnically polish certainly made it easier.

The agreements dividing poland were not made public as far as I know until after the war when the British/Americans got hold of the german copies. The portions of the pact that dealt with poland were secret.

The declarations of war on germany were made after germany invaded poland. The USSR entered poland a couple weeks after the war broke out and did it in such a way that they could in public claim falsely that they were doing other than partitioning poland with germany.

They were expelled from the league of nations in 1939 for various actions.

Because defeating germany was considered more important and because at the time, a wider war with the USSR wasn't seen as helping anything. They were willing to tolerate minor territorial grabs on the part of the USSR in eastern europe along their borders. But if the USSR had done things in other areas (lets say an invasion of Turkey or Iran), the response might have been different.

The partition lines for poland changed over time. Initially, the USSR was supposed to get a large portion of central poland and the germans were to get Lithuania. In september, the two sides decided to swap those territories. The exact motives on the soviet part for the switch I dont know. But the change effectively made the final decision of what to do with central poland a german problem and gave the USSR a better defensive border. Historically, poles under russian rule had been an enormous problem to the russians and it may have been that Stalin in the end decided that that the territory wasn't worth bringing that problem back.

The actual agreements are intentionally vague on the issue of a polish state. It was left to be settled later.

The germans created the 'general government' of poland as the authority in the portions of poland they did not immediatly incorporate into germany. But the general government was never intended to even be a puppet polish state. It was a means of civil organization of the core polish areas and nothing more. Its generally believed that germany intended to incorporate the entire territory directly into germany at a later time. They may have changed their mind as part of their 'big ideas' planning for the reorganization of the whole soviet union after its conquest.

It was more that certain pratical choices had to be made about how to conduct the war. Until germany was defeated, the soviet union was beyond the practical reach of Britain and France anyway. What good does it do to declare a war that will push germany and the USSR into greater cooperation when the USSR can't be attacked anyway.

Later in the war, germany was obviously considered a common enemy of both and a greater evil. And by the end of the war, it was thought that a reasonable deal could be made with the soviet union and that any deal was better than the alternative.

Because Germany invaded first, then Britain and France declared war on

Germany, then two weeks later the Soviet Union invaded.

Legal reasons were that Britain & France had pledged to guarantee Polish independence which, at the time of Sept 17 (Soviet invasion) was pretty much gone as Poland was already defeated by then.

Practical reasons were that the British and the French had their hands

full fighting Germany, and they didn't need an extra great power in the list of their enemies.

Because Germany put the USSR in the Allied camp when it invaded, so the Allies would have been rather foolish to go after their ally, wouldn't

they ?

After 1945, everyone was exhausted by the war, and taking on a major power with the world's largest army wasn't very attractive.

On the other hand, there were Allied plans to help Finland (then at war with the Soviets) at the risk of war against the USSR, and there were other plans to bomb the Baku oil fields from Allied bases in Mesopotamia. There has been a book about it, called Operation Pike or some such title.

No, it isn't.

By whom ?

But generally, yes, it was. And rightly so.

Hitler was the one with the serious history of aggression, having swallowed up Austria and Czechoslovakia. Stalin had attacked Finland and Rumania, but in the name of border disputes only, and had not conquered either country.

Many people in the West were sympathetic to Communism, and of the remainder many regarded it as the lesser of two ideological evils compared to Fascism (at the time, the extent of Stalin's purges were only rumour). But the reason for nor declaring war on the Soviets was more than ideology. Hitler was considered a worse international menace than Stalin, with good

Firstly, they had no obligation to do so. Britain and France guaranteed the existence of the state of Poland against an act of forcible aggression which the Polish government felt required to oppose. By the time the USSR invaded Poland, some time after the German invasion, the Polish state had ceased to exist and the Polish government had ceased to function by reason of German occupation.

And secondly, pragmatically, a conflict between the USSR and Germany was an Anglo-French objective, and declaring war on both the USSR and Germany would make that conflict less, not more, likely.

Stalin did not attack Romania, he extorted territorial concessions under threat of force. Extortion is not the same as armed robbery. And in 1939, he had not even threatened Romania. The Soviet demands against Romania were issued June 26, 1940, long after the crushing of Poland.

True, Stalin's pretext for war with Finland was a 'border dispute' (more correctly, peremptory Soviet demands for the concession of a tenth of the country). The same could be said of Hitler's pretext for war with Poland. In both cases the dictator sought the complete subjugation of the target country. Stalin did not conquer Finland only because the Finns put up such effective resistance.

In fact, he hadn't. Russia's invasion of Finland took place after the campaign in Poland was finished.

Note that, as another poster has pointed out, Britain and other nations did actively help Finland by selling aircraft (Sweden helped even more actively, by assembling American aircraft and I believe by allowing volunteers to fight in Finland). So there was opposition to Russian aggression short of declaring war.

all the best

The Polish Government-in-Exile was not the same thing as the Polish government in Poland. Obviously.

The Polish state did not such thing. Poles in exile from Poland did.